Puppet Consulting

Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool designed to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of servers and IT infrastructure. By defining the desired state of system resources using a declarative language, Puppet enables consistent, repeatable system configurations across development, staging, and production environments. It helps in enforcing system configuration automatically and continuously, ensuring compliance with the specified configurations. Puppet's infrastructure-as-code approach streamlines the process of managing large-scale, complex IT environments, making it a preferred tool for system administrators and DevOps practitioners.

With the rise of Infrastructure-as-Code tools for provisioning infrastructure (such as Terraform), and Orchestration tools for running containers (such as Kubernetes), the need for Configuration Management decreased as it was used mostly to configure Operating Systems and provision resources.

However, there are still use-cases where companies manage the servers' Operating System directly, and they do so using Configuration Management tools.

A number of examples where managing the servers directly is required:

1. Bare-Metal or On-Premise servers
   Can't provision infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code tools (such as Terraform), and can't use fully-managed services for orchestration such as Kubernetes.
   In such cases Configuration Management tools will be used to manage groups of servers, install the applications' dependencies & configuration, and perhaps even install an orchestration tool such as Kubernetes.
2. Specific system requirements
   A given company might choose not to use an orchestration tool as a result of specific system requirements.
   An example would be a company that provides an SDK that communicates with the company's servers, and is implemented in clients' apps and systems, with a requirement by the clients that the SDK takes less than 5ms to respond.
   In that case the networking toll orchestration systems like Kubernetes have on every request will be unacceptable, and so that company will be forced to optimize for a very simple network topology with minimal "hops" between different parts of the system.

There is also the case where companies started with Configuration Management as their main way of building a platform for the developers, and the coupling to the Configuration Management tool became too complicated to be worth "untangling" in the short-term or even mid-term.

• Automates the provisioning, configuration, and management of server infrastructure, reducing manual effort and the potential for errors
• Ensures consistent configurations across environments, improving reliability and stability
• Supports idempotency, meaning it safely applies configurations multiple times to reach the desired state without unintended consequences
• Facilitates compliance and security by enforcing specified configurations and system states
• Offers detailed reporting and real-time insights into configuration changes and system status
• Integrates with various cloud platforms and virtualization tools, enhancing flexibility in infrastructure management
• Supports a modular, reusable code base for managing resources, allowing for efficient scaling and maintenance
• Provides a large ecosystem of pre-built modules on the Puppet Forge for extending functionality
• Enhances collaboration among IT teams by using a common language for infrastructure management
• Supports both agent-based and agentless modes, offering flexibility in how it is deployed and managed